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The commercial endeavors will happily switch to just web scraping. This doesn't hurt anyone but the end-users (it was super useful to have an RSS feed of a specific search with parameters if you were hunting for an apartment, for example, which would then notify you on your phone with an RSS reader app).

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Some sites at least detect scraping and make it a little harder, but if people are doing it, must have some effect and more than to just the end-user down the line. If you are just completely bypassing a site to read text on your phone in an unrelated app, how do you expect that service to survive?

You realize CL doesn't have ads in the first place right? It makes no difference to them, revenue-wise, whether I read their content in a web browser or in an RSS feed -- if anything, I'm saving them bandwidth. They make money by charging for making posts in certain categories in certain locations.

Traditional ads aren't the only form of revenue. All I'm saying is that by bypassing the site completely people maybe aren't helping them survive, which could just be what the market decides and we need a craigslist full of ads, wikipedia too.

https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/paid_posting_accounts

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